Thursday 26 November 2009, 12:36 PM
Cloud computing guzzles juice: official
This story is is spot on: although network vendors make noises about reducing power consumption, in reality the nature of both their products and their locations in the datacentre mean that existing switches and routers aren't going to be thrown out in a hurry.
So there's not a lot of pressure on vendors to make their kit more energy-efficient.
And while I'm here, it should be noted that centralising everything - desktops etc - doesn't always make things more efficient. Not only is there a cost in money and energy associated with moving hardware and processes into the centre, it doesn't follow that the natural assumption that desktops will be replaced by thin clients and fat servers holds true.
In practice, they're far more likely to end up with laptops, which aren't thin from an energy consumption standpoint. And then, because the laptops will be either on standby or away from the office fir some of the time, you'll need to run up the aircon because your office space isn't being heated by a couple of hundred watts per desktop.
Free lunch? Don't think so.
Monday 16 November 2009, 5:59 PM
This Crap Site
How utterly stupid - I am ranked #40 in the top 100 - as a member of this site.....
I mean HOW utterly stupid.... I have done sweet FA, I have only rejoined this site after a 3 or 4 year absence.....
And I have only posted about 3 comments so far - and if that is what it takes to become so highly ranked; it really is pathetic.
Monday 16 November 2009, 3:45 PM
Microsoft Security Update: November Patch Tuesday
Apologies for this late update to our core Patch Tuesday update. Here is a summary of the update ....
The November Patch Tuesday update from Microsoft follows the largest patch and security update in Microsoft’s history. This month there are six updates to Office, Active Directory and Microsoft’s Office application suite.
These six updates have a low impact, bar one patch to Excel which may cause compatibility issues for some applications. The main cause for concern here is that Excel is a primary if not essential element to many environments. For example most banking, trading floor and insurance platforms. Therefore any change must be tested rigorously.
Whilst there are few applications in our sample that are affected, the ChangeBASE AOK team recommends that the Excel update (MS09-067) requires particular attention in any environments where there is a significant dependency on this,
We have included a brief snap-shot of some of the results from our AOK Software that demonstrates some of the potential impacts on Microsoft Office deployments with the following picture.
Testing Summary
MS09-063 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
MS09-064 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
MS09-065 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
MS09-066 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
MS09-067 : : Moderate impact and negligible testing profile
MS09-068 : : Marginal impact and negligible testing profile
The full posting of these results can be found on;
http://www.changebase.com/News/NewsPage.aspx?page=20091110-01_PatchTuesday.xml&style=~/Style/PatchTuesday.xsl
Friday 6 November 2009, 12:30 PM
V-Blocks - do they mean you're V-Locked in?
V-Blocks: it's a new form of packaging for servers, switches and storage for your datacentre, and it looks like the future.
EMC and Cisco have announced that they'll be selling aggregated systems that simply slot into your datacentre. Or 'private cloud', in today's shiny new, updated nomenclature.
Inside the black box will go all the complexity you currently have to manage separately, and the glue to bind them together comes from VMware. It seems like a unique concept, for while Sun tried selling a datacentre in a box and got some traction, this is a different kettle of fish, on a different scale (sorry).
Only HP, with its just-launched Converged Infrastructure concept is anywhere close to this, it seems. The aims of both are similar: to virtualise the hardware and provide a single view of the infrastructure that takes care of the messy details of what VM runs where, what's connected to what, and how. All you need to concern yourself with is the energy bill, security, and general management.
This is the new battleground. Other players are fighting back, including Dell, whose deal with Juniper Networks will allow its resurgent services division to sell combined packages. And IBM has a cloud of products, but it's unclear as yet how well they fit into this new paradigm.
Of course, what this means is that, if you're not in the box, you're locked out. If you're buying, do you care? It's somewhat analogous to the blade server chassis market. There's little commonality and so much vendor lock-in there too, but it's not an issue for most enterprises. And this is a much bigger play which, if successful, promises to bring riches to the pockets of vendors inside the tent.
Will those outside might spend some time getting wet, and find themselves searching for a V-Brolly?
Monday 2 November 2009, 8:30 AM
Adobe Reader in the Enterprise
This week I had the pleasure of working with some of the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers (PFE's) in an effort to further understand some of the application compatibility issues that might occur when sequencing for Microsoft App-V (formerly SoftGrid).
Quickly, the topic turned to compatibility issues surrounding Folder Redirection as this appeared to pose a serious compatibility problem for Adobe.
A quick scan of the web, raised a number of forum posting where numerous IT personnel could not get Acrobat or Reader 9 deployed to C# debugging and "file not found" issues.
For a few samples look here:
http://thinmaillist.blogspot.com/2008/08/thin-re-watch-out-with-adobe-acrobat_9472.html
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5c03a
It looks like there were some pretty drastic solution paths explored here, especially for Citrix deployments. Yikes... I am really glad that I don't have to do this stuff anymore...
Before I dive too deep into the Adobe deployment problems, let's have a little introduction to Microsoft's Folder Redirection .
The idea of re-directing user local data folders onto the network was introduced with Windows XP and is defined as, "the automated re-routing of I/O (operations) from local standard folders to use a different, storage elsewhere on the network". Translated, this means that some standard user folders (i.e. My Pictures, My Documents) are redirected to store your files on a network server. This greatly increases the chances that your files (and Pictures) will get backed up in the laptop being nicked or knackered.
Windows Vista uses folder re-direction on the following directories; Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Music, Videos, Pictures, Searches, AppData, Links, Saved Games.
If your browser has a spell checker AppData would appear with a red underline, which is appropriate as the AppData folder is one which caused us and to my great surprise, Adobe quite a lot of trouble.
Through our trouble-shooting exercise it became Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 were attempting to write user specific data to the AppData folder. This is fine and according to the Microsoft logo application development specifications, this is OK.
So, in an enterprise environment, a user will logon to their desktop or laptop and if their IT department has done their job, the AppData folder will be redirected to something like; \\servername\region\department\username\AppData
And, here is the big issue. As folder re-direction takes place prior to logon- the user will not have any mapped drives. So, the fully qualified path to the final resting place on the target server for AppData will be a UNC path.
Hint: It will be a UNC path.
As you can probably guess where I am going here;
Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader can not store their AppData files onto a UNC path. After a little debugging through their code, it appears that there is a failure to "read from left to right" and correctly parse the full path.
Hence, the file not found, app crashes and C# debugger errors that present themselves to users upon application start-up.
So, I did little more digging and loading Flash and version 6,7 and 8 of Adobe Reader. All of these packages use the redirected folder "AppData" in the same way - and I am sure that they will experience the same issue.
I will write more on the Adobe issues in forthcoming posts. And, there will be plenty to write about as it looks like there are over 400 application level conflicts between Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9.
References:
Folder Redirection has a brief mention here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folder_redirection
Thursday 29 October 2009, 12:30 PM
What Microsoft understands about virtualisation (and a problem for VMware)
When VMware’s main competition was a little company called Connectix (100 people to VMware’s 200), the two virtualisation teams were best enemies; staring each other down, going head to head and planning to crush the opposition and own the market.
When Microsoft bought Connectix and worked through the tortuous internal steps to get to a sensible virtualisation plan, switching from head-on competition to telling VMware what they were doing so everyone could plan ahead on the management tools front was a bit of a shock; when we caught up with him in Redmond recently Ben Armstrong (the Virtual PC Guy) told us he basically had to pinch himself at the first meeting.
Why did it make sense for Microsoft to do this, above and beyond being so big that it has to bend over backwards to be (and be seen to be) fair? It’s because to Microsoft virtualisation isn’t a product; it’s a feature. Just as Windows phones are Windows phones because they’re part of the overall Windows platform, virtualisation is a Windows feature more than it’s a platform in its own right. (This approach has some unexpected benefits, as Ben recently found; if you plug a UPC into a Windows Server but don’t configure the USB/serial port failover software, your VMs are still protected. The server notices it’s running on a machine with a battery and uses the default power management settings; when the UPS battery starts running low, it will shut itself down gracefully – and by default the Hyper-V virtual machines will be saved, ready to restart automatically when you power the server back up.)
I've been saying for a while that most virtualisation projects currently are strategic; I should probably say tactical because I mean that they’re specific projects virtualising a specific thing for a specific benefit. Virtualisation is a deliberate tactic or strategy for that project rather than the default approach. When the management tools are sufficiently mature and migration doesn’t mean choosing between buying identical hardware to migrate to or reducing your VMs to the lowest common denominator so you can migrate across a wider range of hardware, then we’ll all install everything virtualised; until then you’ll have to have a reason.
Ben Armstrong agrees but he calls it something different; he’d say that virtualisation technology is a commodity. Companies pick and choose between VMware and Hyper-V on a per-project basis; just because they used VMware for the last virtualised server doesn’t mean they won’t pick Hyper-V this time if it’s a better fit. Just as they might buy Dell servers this year to go with last year’s HP kit.
That’s not a problem for Microsoft, or at least not as much of a problem as it is to VMware. If you put in VMware, you might go and put Windows Server or SQL Server or Exchange or BizTalk on top of it, and you might choose System Centre to manage it alongside your physical servers. If you choose Hyper-V (free or with Windows Server), VMware has nothing else to sell you. That’s why the rumoured VMware Linux distribution (if it’s not a red herring caused by VMware hiring more folks to work on Linux-based ESX) would make some sense (for VMware that is); you can run Linux on Hyper-V, so you might pick VMware Linux and pay for VMware Linux support. The question is: would you?
- Mary
Sunday 25 October 2009, 6:44 PM
Can cloud savings just evaporate?
We've been at the SharePoint conference this week and I was thinking about Google in the session about using the FAST search engine in SharePoint, in terms of the tweaks administrators can do to refine results and wondering if the Google search appliance offers more controls than it used to (Google's answer used to be along the lines of 'you don't need controls because it works so well' and given that the search algorithm was the secret sauce, the source stayed secret).
I've been thinking about the Sidekick data story on and off for a while too, more in terms of governance and out-sourcing accountability and SLAs than in a technology sense. I often think about cloud services in terms of the tension between lower costs and less control, but I'm not sure if the cost savings always add up. Efficiencies of scale yes, free electricity no. And then I spotted the debate in LA about whether to switch the city government to Gmail and Google Apps bringing up some really interesting points (especially at the LA Times blog).
The contract is for $7.25 million contract; that's a small proportion of the LA city IT budget, but it's not a small contract. The city had 15 proposals (the LA Times says seven of those are from Microsoft; I'm going to assume that's different proposals from Microsoft and partners across on-premise, hosted and cloud solutions with a mix of Exchange, Office and SharePoint, with different features and prices).
Some critics have wondered if the email for the LA police should be in Google servers at all, for privacy reasons. I hope LA is thinking about availability and support issues as well as security and geolocking. But the big argument is, of course, about the money.
Google told the LA Times they have a "dramatically lower cost solution" and the city's Information Technology Agency said that the Google system would save millions of dollars. But then, says the paper " a recent city analysis found that, instead of offering clear budgetary savings, installing and running Google Apps would actually exceed the cost of the current Novell system by $1.5 million over the five-year life of the contract."
To get such different figures means they're measuring different things. I keep saying most companies don't know what their IT costs them or what value it has for them. We have to get more instrumentation and better cost analysis - or working out what saves money and what costs money can cost more than you'd save by changing in the first place.
-Mary
Sunday 25 October 2009, 2:56 PM
CentOS 5.4 Released
I'm still keeping my dual-Atom CPU Multi-Boot Mini-Server up to date, so I was pleased to see the release of CentOS 5.4 a week or so ago. This is known as the Community Enterprise Operating System, and although it is based on a fresh compilation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, it goes far beyond being just that. It includes more and better packages, improved updating and repositories, and much more. Although this is a minor release step (5.3->5.4), there are some significant changes and improvements. Check the Release Announcement for general information, and the Release Notes for a detailed list of new and updated packages.
If you want to take a look at CentOS, this release has both i386 and x86_64 LiveCD downloads. One small word of caution, though. Unlike most other distributions, you can not install CentOS from the LiveCD, for that you have to download the DVD distribution. I installed the 64-bit distribution on MMS today with no problems.
jw 25/10/2009
Tuesday 20 October 2009, 1:53 PM
Fill that power gap: batteries or flywheels?
Are flywheels better than batteries? I visited a datacentre a while back that had a flywheel to fill the gap between power outages and the diesel generator kicking in. The datacentre manager told me it made sense because batteries - the usual alternative - were expensive to maintain and to cool
"Batteries would need a chiller full time to keep them cool, which means 250kW off the top of our power usage, compromising our density proposition. Also, batteries aren't particularly green – although green is important, most customers won't pay extra for it," I was told.
Now Chloride, a battery maker - oops, a company that used to make batteries but now focuses on UPSes - tells me that this is hogwash and that if the datacentre manager had come to them he'd have found that flywheels have their own issues (of course) and that batteries hardly heat at all as they only do so when working - charging or discharging - and that most of the time they're doing neither.
Which is right? What's your take on batteries versus flywheels? (That's big lumps of rotating metal, not Wolf J. - look it up!)
Friday 16 October 2009, 9:08 AM
Microsoft App-V: Helpful Tools
I wanted to mention a rather useful tool that have recently come from Microsoft.
As quoted by one of the TechNet blogs;
"The Microsoft Installer (MSI) Utility for Microsoft Application Virtualization, a utility for SoftGrid Application Virtualization solution that bridges the gap between traditional physical control of installed applications and the new paradigm of virtual applications."
This means that you can now load MSI packages into SoftGrid environments and not have to "Sequence" or convert them to SoftGrid (SFT) packages before deployment. This would allow an organization to utilize their existing SMS environment and "dilute" their application management efforts through supporting two different application management formats.
Have a read:
http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/09/11/microsoft-unveils-plans
-for-the-msi-utility-for-microsoft-virtualization-at-vmworld.aspx
And the official source:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/sep07/09-11virtualization.mspx
This makes sense as the SoftGrid SFT file format was riddled with Open Source/GPL software and the compression algorithm was written by a lovely French chap who detested Microsoft - hardly the recipe for a thriving format for M$. I am not too sure that this is going to work for more difficult/complex applications. However, it may help with some of the rapid proto-typing required to get a SoftGrid (aka MAV) environment off the ground and get some applications sequenced quickly, ready for testing (i.e. thrashing).
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